


And Then

by archea2



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angry Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Only not quite, Soulmarks, Tears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-08-20 02:24:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20220241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: When Diego had begun to stutter, it felt to him as if his body was tripping, misstepping, as if there was a switch in Diego that should have been flipped and wasn’t. Perhaps his soul is switched off, too. Perhaps this is him once again failing to keep up in the race. At the thought his windpipe closes up, his throat swollen by betrayal, because what if Luther’s wrong? What if Luther’s true mate pops up outside the house? What if they are among the legion of Spaceboy’s fans who missed theTeen Soulissue, and Dad’s Masterplan for keeping them celibate warriors, and keep sending Spaceboy hopeful pics of their wrists?





	And Then

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Electra_XT](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Electra_XT/gifts).

> Dear Electra_XT,
> 
> Here's hoping I've done at least some of your lovely prompts justice! And here's to these two emotional disasters, and the odds they do find a way to bond in Season 2.

The tattoo artist is a moving blur, seen as he is through a perspiration of pain. Once Diego forces his gaze into focus, though (because he _can_ do this, make it his lot to out-Luther in muscular martyrdom)... it falls on the guy’s arm. 

The arm, naked and enormous, is inked inside out - up to the artist’s meaty shoulder. But the motif on his right wrist is different, its tracery finer and subtler than the black graffiti. It looks like a tiny snake and a rose at once, if a rose could twist on itself or a snake open a five-petal mouth, and it’s as neat as one of Mom’s hand-stitched pieces. That is, if Mom was into zombie roses.

Big Burly moves his gaze in the trail of Diego’s and _ flinches_, much to Diego’s outrage, before he pulls his arm back and gives his victim a right-handed pat. Off you go, champ. Nothing to see here, time to skedaddle. Pat on cue, it’s Luther who leaps to his feet, a vertical stoic.

“Check out his wrist,” Diego whispers as they cross paths and Luther’s arm consoles his, briefly, across two layers of starched cotton. Touch is Luther’s exception to Dad’s new Rule of Two, which apparently consists in setting up one-on-one cock fights among his brood, team spirit be damned. So Allison is allowed to get her way any way she pleases while Dad stays deaf to Vanya’s plaintive arpeggios, or harps on about Five needing to learn from Ben’s interdimensional feats. 

It’s like their current twosomes are felt by Dad as another menace, which, grotty. Worse and worse: Dad has taken exception with Luther and Diego’s puppy-pile roughhousing, which used to be fun and cool and their thing, because Klaus says he knows better ways to get a nosebleed, merci you, Ben’s the bookish sort, and you can’t pin Five down unless you catch him first, which, yeah right. But Luther and Diego love sparring - love the catch-me-if-you-can dare of it, until they’ve wound their arms and legs around each other, only for Luther to fling Diego off - gently, always gently - and Diego to land, turn, pirouette around the strong straight line of Luther’s spine. They complete each other, Diego thinks. Like those birds bobbing heads and flapping wings at each other they caught on the telly once, that Klaus said was swans on poppers but Mom, who knows best, said was a dance. 

However, Dad doesn’t want them to dance. Dad wants a duel, not a duet.

“I asked him,” Allison says, her tears long dried. They have the afternoon off for the ink to “settle”, and they’re spending it on the Academy’s roof, aka their HQ, cookie cache, sunbathing spot and super observation point on the ten-feet-below. 

“Who, Dad?”

“No, silly.” (Allison is a little too fond of copying Mom.) “The man! He wouldn’t say, and I couldn’t… _ ask _ him, not with Dad looking on. Maybe it’s a guild thing.”

“Like... a gang?” Luther, wide-eyed, glances over to Diego. “I could draw it from memory - I focused on it real hard, like you said -”

The words light a fuse in Diego’s chest, a hot jolt of response. It blossoms down his arms, all the way to the scalded patch on his wrist, resurfacing in pain-pleasure.

“ - so I could tell Dad,” Luther says in one earnest breath, and the jolt flatlines.

“Boring,” Five cuts in. He turns to Vanya, huddled against a chimney-pot as she tugs down on her cardigan sleeve. There’s a smudge of ink on her index finger. “Hey, Vanya. What’s the difference between a fuga and a mathematical equation?”

“You should only practice one of them,” Vanya says, shy-stern, and Ben’s laughter washes over the talk, sweeping it clean of gangs and needles. It leaves them children for a while, to romp and squabble over the last butterscotch sweet (Diego whizzes it to his palm), then count down the colours lodged in the City’s sky until only one is left home.

* * *

The sunsets come and go, and before they know it they’re posing for some magazine called _ Teen Soul_. Arms linked, left palm up. 

“But this is so unique,” the interviewer keeps saying. “Simply super! I mean, there’s Platonic, and there’s SibSoul, only last week we had the Gallagher bros here, Liam and Noel, quite the doodle they share. And then there’s _ six _ identical soulmarks - got all of them, Rudi? (to the photographer) - and that’s gonna make a splash, trust my word!”

“Well, we’re a team,” Luther says, nonplussed. “I mean, it’s what our training is all about. I mean. Team spirit.”

Spirit, soul. Tomato, ketchup. Only not quite, because the woman is saying, “Well, the more the merrier, right?”, cautious now, looking along the sides of them to where Dad is standing, hands clasped before him and gloved to the hilt. “Don’t worry, we’ll totes sell them as Platonic-coded. You don’t want to start the nasty tattle. Or crush down the crushes.” She laughs a little. “The day I woke up with mine, I was heartbroken because it’s a spider, see? And I was totes in love with Marty McFly…”

“Time’s up,” Dad’s voice booms over their heads. “Children, into the car. It’s not as though today’s schedule can afford a hitch.”

“What d’you mean, woke up?”

“Number Five, you were given a command!”

“I’m sorry,” Klaus tells the lady, kindly, because Klaus has his hours of kindness when not hanging upside down from his window balcony to get a head rush. “Spiders suck. ‘Specially at close quarters. But you should see some of the worms!”

“Just, how can you _ wake _ up with a _ tattoo_?”

“Number Five!”

Five, true to self, puts two and two together - and turns fugitive. It’s never clear to Diego if his brother jumped back to prevent Big Burly from claiming that spot, virgin land, skin as soft-knit as their souls were then, for his needle. Or skipped from time to time, a frantic hopscotch, to chase a quantum self with a clear slate of wrist. If any of them is down for reclaiming his fate, it's Five.

Not so Luther, who, when Diego comes to him uneasily in the wake of Five’s grand exit, shakes his head and says, “Okay, say there’s a mark here, in the making, and Dad put our logo on it. So what? We’re not meant to stay close and fight together, now? Says who?”

His hand is held out, a gesture known and loved from the many times Luther hauled Diego’s ass up from the gym floor or rerouted the last donut away from Klaus’s sticky paws. And Diego takes it, his heartbeat sharp, because this isn’t a grip or a casual brush, this is Luther’s palm marrying his. He glances down at Luther’s wrist, but all he sees is the Academy tattoo with its roundel and the umbrella inside, and maybe - _ maybe _ \- the right semi-circle of the roundel looks a bit more… there? Grainy-like? But it doesn’t mean squat. It doesn’t _ signify_, as Ben loves to say.

[ ](https://imgur.com/kC4Vstz)

Or, wait. It’s a half. That’s something, right? And if Diego squints very hard at his own wrist, and the circle thereon, maybe…

… No. No, he cannot honestly say his left semi-circle looks anything other than tattoo-ish. 

“Does it itch?” he asks, tracing the grainy relief with his finger. Luther grins at him - the real thing, not one of his press conf insta-smiles - and lets him.

“A bit. Allison says hers does, too. And Klaus, but, uh…” The sentence peters into a hiatus and Diego lets it hang. Klaus itching doth not evidence make.

“Not me,” he says instead, frowning at his logo-ed wrist. When Diego had begun to stutter, it felt to him as if his body was tripping, misstepping, as if there was a switch in Diego that should have been flipped and wasn’t. Perhaps his soul is switched off, too. Perhaps this is him once again failing to keep up in the race. At the thought his windpipe closes up, his throat swollen by betrayal, because what if Luther’s wrong? What if Luther’s true mate pops up outside the house? What if they are among the legion of Spaceboy’s fans who missed the _Teen Soul_ issue, and Dad’s Masterplan for keeping them celibate warriors, and keep sending Spaceboy hopeful pics of their wrists?

But Luther squeezes their hands, strong enough to undo the black squeeze in Diego’s throat, and things feel a little better.

* * *

Too little, too soon.

He confides to Ben at lunch and Ben, sweet smart observant Ben, whispers back that Diego can chisel any mark he likes, it’s, like, Diego’s skill. Which Diego applies here and forthwith to the expanse of his wooden chair. By the time he goes to sleep, there are secret left semi-circles on his bedstead, window-sill, wardrobe drawers and dado panels. Mom pauses on the threshold before she crosses over to his bed for an equally secret kiss.

“Good-night, dear. Oh! Did you know our stairs end on a left-handed volute? Fancy that!”

The next day, Ben dies.

Luther carries him back to the car, his blond hair soaked and clotted in Ben’s blood like Luther dyed it red this morning. Ben’s left arm dangles over Luther’s, listless and _ shaking _ because all of Luther is a stumbling shock wave, and when Diego runs to them and grabs Ben, his gaze lands on the nascent phantom lines. On Ben’s wrist. Too thin to read if you aren’t Ben; eternally incomplete.

He doesn’t cry. Tears would blur the lines - better to harden, deep inside, so they can be carved onto Diego. It wasn’t Ben’s fate to be a blotched script. It wasn’t, but Dad made it so. And Sir Reginald was wrong, _ Luther _was wrong (betrayal changing sides), because they were never meant to stay “all together” and play out Dad’s stupid crusade. He tells Luther so, furiously, and Luther only holds him tighter, tight enough that the hardness in Diego threatens to crack. 

But not enough. 

Luther is putting all of his strength into standing tall, the spine to their human pyramid, the pillar to their hidey-hole. And Diego wants, ah! wants nothing more than for Luther to crush and engulf him, to _ unground _ him, until Diego’s doubt and anger no longer know which way to turn and he can bury his head into Luther’s neck, gold-dusted and immoveable.

Still not enough.

For here is Vanya sauntering down to breakfast with a new light in her eyes and an exquisite loop of silver on her wrist. Says, it's a treble clef. Says, now she knows where her soul belongs and it’s music, echoing the Vanya who said “Strawberry jam for me” at Griddy’s, half-shy, half-defiant. But Sir lets her go. Soon after, Diego, back from playing truant and hiding in the lobby’s shadows, overhears Sir tell Pogo “... clef, as you know, is French for _ key_. Could it be that, after all we’ve done...” and perhaps, if Diego felt less of a hard shadow, he would loiter to hear more. 

But Allison is turning seventeen too, and she is enough of a distraction - not per se, though part of Diego acknowledges that if any of them is poised for single fame (not he), poised for the power and the glory, it’s Allison. The shadowier Diego, the brighter Allison. And Luther - Luther likes the night, space made visible in darkness, but he likes radiance, too, and Diego can see how Allison’s draws him in like a tide to the moon. Some time after Vanya’s departure, she takes advantage of a mission to slip away, and when she comes back, long past curfew, her wrist is raw and red. Naked.

“I’ve heard a rumor that you let me,” she tells Dad, looking him in the eye like a real man. 

The mark on her wrist turns out golden-green. It starts geometrical: a square, with a circle (full) within. 

“A target,” Diego says.

“Or a camera eye,” Allison says. “And inside, look - that has to be a shamrock, right?”

“Three leaves,” Klaus says, sharing a pointed look between Luther, Diego and her. “Okay, wink, nudge. And congrats on putting the no in monogamy.”

_ Like hell_, Diego thinks, meeting her eye to eye, neither ready or willing to concede. _ Bring it on,_ he stares. And she: _ Can you even boast of half a circle? _And then she gets a call from one Patrick O’Donnell, “Hollywood’s honorary hottie” (Klaus), which puts a brand new spin on things and clover leaves.

“Whatever,” Klaus says, waving his pincushion of a wrist. His life purpose, Diego suspects, is to stick it as many times as required to make it illegible. Trackmarks, red in tooth and claw, trump soulmark. It would break Diego’s heart, Klaus’s refusal to find a mate in his lifetime, if Klaus did not make it clear that he has all the company he wants, merci you and ciao.

“So,” Diego tells Luther after a two-headed mission that went well enough. Luther's still in his black leathers - and, god, what’s well and truly criminal is how the thing fits Luther like a glove, no, Luther’s _body_ fits him like a glove. Diego’s chubbier body fits him like a boxing glove, despite his best efforts to DIET (Mom, sadly, isn’t programmed to cook salt-free) and EXERCISE (he can do push-ups! He can! Why does Sir carry on like Luther patented the damn thing?). 

“So,” Luther says warmly. Then stops, at a loss. It’s not that Luther is dumb - Luther can read people pretty well, better than Diego. He had Pogo call a cab the moment Allison hung up, then stationed himself by the door, brokenly erect, to hug her while she was still searching for words. No, the fault lies in Diego’s face, which has taken to smouldering as its default mode. 

“So, you next on the karcher line?”

“Oh no. I mean. Why should I? My soul - my soul is all here, you know.” 

And this should be good. They should be good, except _ here _ is one hell of an umbrella term (ha!). _ Here _ is all over the place, and if the place is right here, where every wall, pillar or floor is stamped with Sir’s autocratic seal, then Diego wants out of here.

“Oh, come on. You’re Spaceboy, for God's sake. The sky’s your limit - not the house gate.” (Smoulder, smoulder, smoulder.) 

And then Luther has the gall - the _ gall _ to take off his glove and tug up his sleeve. The roundel with which Sir branded them has paled with the years, making the semi-circle that is all Luther’s even more emphatic. There’s another soul-line in the making, only it’s so shallow Diego can’t quite makes it out. Luther does, though, clearly. All it takes is look at Luther’s face, earnest and intent, for the mark to take on a textbook identity.

[ ](https://imgur.com/pTx0rm4)

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“No, no,” Luther says earnestly. “I showed it to Dad, and he promised - it’s incredible, Diego, he’s researched space travel longer than any of us pictured - subsidized an entire - _ interplanetary _, Diego! - and he says, maybe I’m meant to go there. I mean.”

It’s even crueller than Diego could picture, because Luther’s face is lit up from the inside for the first time in months. Luther is telling Diego he’s found his soulmate, and he’s doing it _ smiling_. 

“Yeah, well. Congrats on your pending honeymoon, I’m out.”

“What? No! Diego, I thought - I hoped - you might c-”

“I might care? Nah, s-s-screw you. _ Screw _ you. I don’t give a gnat’s shit if you stay or go, Number One. The street is good enough for me, so I guess I’ll see you... never.”

It’s a clean-cut wound - Diego, after all, is the expert. Never mind that he targeted it at himself. The wound festers into a rift, or so Diego figures. It doesn’t help that he spends most of the following year rewriting their last dialogue and it STILL goes pear-shaped because his fucking brain, for some reason, will only let him script his and Luther’s lines apart.

_ Come with me_, he says. _ Space is right at your door, let me take you there_.

_ If I can’t give you space, I can give you the night_, he says.

_ We can share it, make it beautiful, the two of us. I’m okay with sharing the cause, I get it, okay? Man, I get _serve and protect_ because I learnt it from the best, but, _ he says, _ it doesn’t have to be a sacrifice. _

_ How is it my fault_, he yells, _ you have a death wish the size of Peru? _

_ ...Sorry _, he says.

But

_ Better to be One alone than be one with you,_ this Luther says.

_ Your night, _ he says, _ boils down to you sweating kombucha tea and adrenaline. You think it compares with Allison’s starry night? With Dad’s cosmic dawn? _

_ Dad’s the best, _ he says, _ you thankless prick_. 

_ You know what I have that you don’t? A soulmark. A closing parenthesis_, he says, _ and that’s you and me. _

_ Doesn’t cut it, _ he says, _ for once in your life _.

Needles are right out. But some balms will do the trick with time and patience, and Diego has his tattoo rubbed out before he joins his new academy. He thinks it will preclude any “nasty tattle” of favouritism. Instead, he gets a new alias from the other recruits who pass him in the dorm showers or watch him bench press. The Soulbino, they call him - not for compliment’s sake. 

Diego thinks of Mom’s hand on his cheek. Recalls the white coolness of her arm, unmarked unless you zip it open, which he’s seen Dad or Pogo do before. Hears her parting words to him: "Caring for you children is my badge of pride. Why would I need another?" 

It helps, he and Mom being two of a kind. Patch helps, too - who owes her nickname to the big plaster on her wrist. Patch is very sticks and stones about the name-calling. You think you have it bad, try passing yourself off for a nicotin fiend because yours is a frickin’ _pink_ _sheriff’s star_. You’ll live.

Diego gives the police life a go, until it’s one slur too many and his fist takes it upon itself to champion his soul. The guys shut up, but Diego’s incognito is long gone by then, so it’s only a matter of time before one of them scratches his own wrist, oh so carefully, and takes it up to the brass with a whine about “that knife psycho”. Diego is already the odd man out, a loner tried and true, and soon enough he’s kicking another Academy’s dust off his feet. 

Al’s boxing ring is… not home. But Diego gets a job and a hidey-hole of his own. More to the point, he gets to bandage his wrists before every fight on the ring. Which, good enough to go with. 

And then Vanya publishes that damn book.

It finds its way to Diego’s locker through no fault of his own. When he spots it, his stomach does a belly-flop at the sight. He rips off the cover, but there’s no stopping the nasty, not when Vanya's tattle is all over the place. 

_ We were told to call each other brother and sister. But the truth is that my siblings were lost electrons, bending the laws of attraction even as they bent space and reality. _

_Take my brother Diego. His professed love was to our mother, but we knew better - all of us save One. We knew where his heart’s desire truly lay _. 

_ For all that I was ordinary, I had a purpose, recorded on my flesh and skin. Diego had none. What he had was an obsession - Luther. Even now, when I catch a glimpse of the Kraken on the news (he never made it to the tabloids, and will eternally grudge Allison her limelight), it strikes me. Why did he vow himself to black and leather? Because Luther does. Luther still wears his mission garb, and Diego still mimicks him to his best. Why does he keep up his vigilante act, even after denying my father’s quest? Because Luther does. If One’s fate was to enact his name’s promise - stay alone, the better to chase his own wild goose, his father’s love -, then Two lucked out equally. He is Two in name, never in fact - and too headstrong to reckon it. _

He glues the cover to his punching-bag and pummels it, again and again and_ again_. It’s harsh - it’s vile - it’s something he would never do to the real girl. And it’s no use. No matter how hard and often, he can’t strike her words out. 

A fortnight after Vanya’s book emerged, Luther is interviewed. His public statements have become sparse and meager - Diego could tell you, could quote them chapter and verse - probably on Dad’s order. But Spaceboy’s monkish life style isn't enough to turn the paparazzi away, one of whom ambushes him right after he’s hauled the Mardi-Gras float off the mayor, who had somehow got trapped under it. 

“Your sister’s book is top of the charts,” the girl says, a last-ditch attempt to spark some life in Luther’s drained face. “I’m sure it’s been quite a shock to you.”

“I’m sure you are,” says Luther.

The reporter is not so easily put off.

“It provides some... _inordinary_ views on your family dynamics.” (Pause.) “Provocative, even.” (Pause.) “Have you and the Kraken been in, ah, touch recently?”

“My brother has broken all contact with us.”

“Understandable,” the girl says. “Of course, I wouldn’t dream of asking you -”

“I miss him.”

“You - I’m sorry?”

“I miss him,” Luther says, barely louder, looking away from the camera. Above the mask, his hair is a darker blond, clipped as short as Diego’s, with the same chinstrap stubble. Diego stares back from across the screen; feels that transparent hardness between them.

Vanya is right. He’s a fake. A fitness junkie, because mimicry is the closest he can get to Luther’s impeccable body; a justiceer, because deep, deeper, deepest down, underneath his Declaration of Independence, Diego wants his rounds to overlap with Luther’s missions. Yet how could they? Diego’s rounds are down to earth. He only saves the little people: the muggee, the small-fry hostage or dark-skinned passerby in the wrong street at the wrong time, the mom’n pop store owner caught in a stick-up. Luther’s missions orbit a far higher sphere. 

There is, however, one thing that Sir doesn't have - and that’s a psychic informer.

“D-i-ego!” Klaus yells across the grocery where Diego buys his green tea. (What? Real men keep a healthy digestive system.) “Psst! Officer! Problem, officer!”

“Will you shut up,” Diego growls. It’s too early for Klaus’s gadfly act, i.e. embarrassing Diego until the latter gives in and provides whatever it is Klaus craves, from waffles to a tete-a-tete with Diego’s shampoo. 

“No, but seriously, _ problem_.” Klaus’s eyes are nine parts pupil to one part hazel, and Diego sighs under his breath, but lets Klaus take his coat sleeve between his finger and thumb and drag him to the nearest café.

“It’s this ghost, Mrs. Cartano,” Klaus blurts in medias res, then stops to glare over his shoulder. “Okay, okay, _ Ms. _ Cartano. She was raised right and proper, as she’s been telling me for the last. Fourteen. Hours. And it’s not right, what she witnessed.”

Diego runs a hand through his sweat-soaked hair. It wants a shower. _ He _ wants a shower, not Klaus speaking up for some old biddy who probably got a heart attack watching her cat get run over. 

“Getting there, Ms. C.,” Klaus reassures the air, but stops again to feed his latte three spoonfuls of sugar. It’s enough to give Diego diabetes by proxy. “So, the lady happens to be a cleaning lady. A respectable one, she’d have us know. One of her gigs is at the new College of Agriculture, just outside the city. They’re supposed to run all sorts of tests there, y’know. How to make our grub less toxic, so we don’t have to market Silent Green overnight. What? Yes, Ben, I know it’s spelled Soylent. I’m giving Diego the _ idea_.”

“And making a shit job of it.” The smoulder is back. It’s still dark o’clock; Diego’s played out; and while he learnt years ago to take the Benbabble in stride, doesn’t mean he has to like it.

“Moving on, moving on. What they’re really up to is doing Satan’s work, quoth Ms. Cartano. See, she asked if she could work overtime because she needed the cash - no family, she told them, no pension schemes, no nothing - and they took that as permission to make her their guinea-pig. Thus, ghost.”

Diego leans forward. “_How _?”

Klaus tilts his head sideways to pump more intel. “There’s an underground lab. They’re testing a new biochemical substance. Not the fun sort - the boring bad sort. Something something something mark-altering.”

“Wait, what?”

Klaus shrugs. “Soulmarks, I think. They’re trying to, I dunno, tinker with them? Edit them. Control the design.” A plaintive yawn. “There, I told the cavalry. Can I get a nap, now? No, I don’t care that I remind you of Scott Baio! Go _ away_!”

But Diego has stopped listening. Because - unless Klaus is pranking him, which, unlikely - this is big. Like, Sir-big. It’s a known fact that a number of political and celebrity matches are done on a mark-basis, because man is a superstitious bastard, even at top rank. Ask the markmatchers, markhunters, ask any PR in the vast corporate business. They'll all tell you the same: find a way to tamper with the mark, and you can make or mar alliances. You have yourself a massive tool of persuasion and a drug with unlimited market potential. 

What Klaus put on the table, besides this skinny elbows, is a fucking heroic _ scoop_.

Diego ransacks his pockets, throws the bills unsorted. “Get a room,” he says. 

He thinks there's a faint, indignant “Single!” in his back, but the street’s growl is already enveloping him.

* * *

Finding the evil underground lab is a piece of cake. 

Only... the lab is crowded wall to wall. And the men in white aren’t your garden variety villains. They're bristling with needles and shit, and the perimeter is lined with bodyguards who look like they made kevlar the new lycra. Big game, big rules. Diego may be a hothead, but even he knows better than to tackle them head-on. 

As a child, he was trained to make himself invisible. It has served him before, and it serves him now as he cold-reads the battlefield. His best chance, he reckons, is to wait until the white coats clock out, taking some of the guards with them. There’s a sort of antechamber to the lab, a cross between closet and supply room, so Diego waits until the crowd ebbs away for lunch. Not for the first time, he has a flashback - pure as a pang - of Five, as he himself dashes across the lair and into the closet.

Into the closet, and into a strong, warm, _ known _ chest.

Lightning-quick, there is an arm around him, blocking his knife access, and a hand to his mouth. He is being crushed against the chest, slowly but surely, his head swirled by a rush that’s more than oxygen deprivation. His nostrils battle for air, but with air comes the tan of leather, made warm and supple by Luther’s body heat. So long, so fucking _ unfairly _long.

“Ow!” Luther whispers, jerking his hand away. “Diego?”

“Let go of me, you stupid oaf!”

(Thankfully, the door is thick and the lab is in full clinking-fuming-pneumatic swing.)

“You bit me!”

“You choked me first!”

“How was I to know it was you? This is a classified mission, Diego!”

The thing with anger: it’s an all-fuel engine. There’s very little Luther could say to quench it after five years incommunicado, and referencing the hierarchy between his and Diego’s exploits is, like, top-tier fuel.

“And it’s dangerous, you shouldn’t be -”

“At least I didn’t need Dad to sign my permission slip!”

Luther drops into silence. In any lesser circumstances, Diego might heed it; might pull back, take a breath, give Luther’s tormented eyes a chance. Right now, though? Silence is fuel. It triggers Diego’s move, the sharp advance of his hip and groin into Luther’s very cramped personal space. The air between them is dark and chafed, and Diego’s hardness is met in kin - only leather between him and the strained, suffocating flesh of Luther’s placketed cock - abd a tiny sound from Luther’s mouth.

Diego is suffocating, too, but he forces the dark air in.

“Oooh, you got big,” he says, his voice too raw for Diego himself to tell grief from glee and rage from plea in his dark lower tones. He takes the push to Luther’s torso; walks Luther back, step after oddly pliant step, and still Luther obeys; only punches the air next to Diego. It’s like Luther’s hard-on has flipped the hierarchy between them, proclaiming Luther's silence as his shame, which only fuels Diego onward - Diego’s anger that Luther should repent of wanting _ him_. 

“Want this?” he taunts the penumbra, putting his hand where his hip is, and Luther’s fist flies to... his mouth, _ Luther’s _ mouth, gagging his own cry. Diego finds the zip - the lie of the uniform still the same, only man-size. Finds it, tugs it down, hard. Takes his fingers, not gentle, to Luther’s strong-veined cock, oblivious to the place and time, or the hazard of an unlocked door.

All the while, Diego’s tongue lashes itself round his words.

“Oh yes, oh yes, you do. And you hate that you do, _brother_, but you’re too much of a good boy to fib. So tell me. Tell me, and maybe - maybe! - I’ll let you rip this out so it falls all the way down to your ankles, and then... and then I’ll turn you face to the wall, big boy, so I can teach you the meaning of fuck.” He palms Luther once, half a slap to the hard column of flesh, and expects more blood to rush to his head like a preliminary orgasm. Instead, the grief carves him like a pit. Luther is silent, head bowed, arms humble and slack at his sides. And Diego...

... Diego gets it. 

Luther is not ashamed of his heart's desire, no.

Luther is ashamed of his heart’s denial. He won’t say it, because Luther’s voice has been conditioned from the cradle to echo one and only one purpose, which is not his own. But he will do what Luther does best - he will embrace the shame. By letting Diego, what? Manhandle him? Punish him? Worse?

They are so close. Diego can feel the solid planes of Luther’s chest as they rise and fall, Luther wrestling his own breath. It brings back a medley of images. Innocent sparring moves, filled with joy and giggles. Back-to-back fights, Luther’s fists matching his blades for swiftness. The rise and fall of Luther's shoulders, a shadow on his bedroom wall, Luther struggling to make his sobs inaudible after Allison left. That time Luther tore an entire sheet of muscles and then hugged _ Diego _ better, with his other arm, while Mom bandaged him up.

And now this? This is what they’ve come to?

Suddenly the pit in him is a crater, flowing up to his eyes. He tries to speak Luther’s name, but his tongue is not up to it. 

“I c… I c-c-c…”

His cheeks are running. He takes a step back, finds Luther’s aching gaze.

“I… I c-can’t…”

And Luther’s face changes. Even in the dark, Diego can see when understanding strikes; when his brother's face glows tender with concern. Luther bends his head again, and Diego’s arms rise, Diego's old pact with air and gravity, now revived to heal him. His arms find Luther's neck, begging for Luther to enfold him again, and Luther does at once. Diego feels for Luther’s mouth, and Luther gives it. Luther gives simply, Diego takes pell-mell. It could be one kiss or twenty, weaving their breaths together: Diego loses a count he forgot to start. He clings to the softness and muscle of Luther's soul made touch, made taste, letting Luther suck warm little places all over his slippery cheeks. It's a five-year-old wound made better, and Diego doesn't care if it takes another half-decade to heal it.

(Later, he will reckon it was only a dozen minutes between one embrace and another. The lab is still chittering when he comes to, Luther’s mouth covering his, Luther turning him gently, unstoppably, in his arms, so that his own body stands between Diego and the door.) 

“Missed you,” Luther says, and he looks it. He looks it so much that Diego opens his mouth in turn, but Luther speaks first, again, speaks Luther words that tickle Diego's parted lips. “Let’s finish this, yeah? And then…”

Their hands meet half-way down, fumbling together to zip up Luther. Awkward, if their mouths weren’t doing the same.

“And then,” Diego chimes. He pulls back, and then, because he’s the impatient one, “So what’s the plan?”

“Well, I -” Luther bites his lip, still wet. Exhales across the bite. “We. The way I see it, _we_ jump them, you cover me, and I trash this place to the bone. Um. Okay with you?”

“Peachy,” Diego says, because there’s subtle, and there’s diverse, and then there’s being raised by Sir as a one-skill hero. At least they can coordinate. “Hell, yeah. I got your back.”

Luther smiles, his face suddenly young with love and faith in Diego. 

“Good. Good. Let’s do this, then.”

* * *

And then, the shot.

It's not supposed to go like this. It's not the plan! One minute, Luther is stripping the hub while Diego hacks him a way through the scum. They make a dance of it, like they did before, back when Klaus and Allison cheered them from the sidelines, Luther drumming his punches to the whistle of Diego’s blades.

Diego low-kicks an assaulter out of his axis, straight onto Luther’s fist. Only... only they never connect. Instead, the guy trips over a table that was kinda strewn out, and when Luther bends over him, the guy’s arm unwinds like a coil and there’s a booming noise. 

Luther falls right over the table and its spilled content.

* * *

It will take years to erase that dire, rattling noise that Luther does with his lungs while Diego holds his hand, watching the swollen veins blacken across his chest.

(Luther tore off the leather with both hands. Diego battled him - his spine, arching off the floor - clenched so hard, Diego thought he would hear it snap...)

Once Pogo gets his call, once he sends a car and stretcher their way, Diego falls silent. He doesn't tell Pogo to get hold of Klaus, because Klaus has no number and wouldn’t bother to pick up anyway. He doesn't ask for Mom. He hangs up and crawls back to Luther.

He is still clutching Luther’s hand when the stretcher is wheeled into the Academy. 

It’s like Diego can sense the poison snaking its way down, down to Luther's soul, while Luther fights it all the way. They’re conjoined, he and Luther: what shakes Luther rattles Diego. He no longer feels his hand, numbed by Luther’s Titanic grasp, and yet he can feel the drug writhing along Luther’s left arm, trying to seize hold of his mark. Luther’s breath moans; falters; but Diego holds on, willing him to live.

“Damn it!”

Dad only glanced his way once when he entered; nodded curtly, like Diego being here was a fucking _ homecoming_, and told him not to stand in the way. Diego jutted his chin and held on to Luther’s hand. Now Dad takes in the two of them, and Diego, pulling his gaze away from Luther, catches the white gleam of his coat. It reminds him of the lab, that poisonous hub; and when Dad says “Give me the serum”, Diego flinches alert.

“What’s that?” 

“What’s that to you, Number Two? Do you want your brother dead or active? Pogo!”

Mom is dead still. Pogo looks from one to the other, but something in him has his arm dip, fetch and extend even as Diego says “Pogo, what serum?”

“It’s all right, dear boy.” Comfort in a toneless voice. “It will make Master Luther stronger. What the soul can’t bear, the body may subdue. We just need to - amp it up a little.” 

“But…” 

It’s not what Luther would want. It makes no sense, that Dad would rob Luther of what he fell defending, the _habeas corpus _ that forbids one man to dispose of another’s body against his consent. This is not adapting - it’s perverting. It’s what Diego stepped away from in the first place, and it's what Luther’s _and then_ acknowledged, the possibility of a choice. 

Dad is holding the syringe high in the air, targeting Luther’s heart. The glint in his eye is old, no, is millennial. It might have been seen in the Moriah, when Abraham bent over his only son with a knife.

In the corner of Diego’s eye, Mom gives the tiniest shake of the head.

Diego knows about needles. They’re metal, and they’re sharpened to a point. And perhaps there’s a conspiracy of steel, or perhaps the sight of Luther, stripped and vulnerable, triggers Diego's dormant skill. Whatever. It doesn’t matter that the steel is in Sir’s hand. It will obey Diego all the same, like every shred of metal on this Earth: when Diego raises his free hand, the needle flies out of Sir’s, draws a perfect half-circle in the air, and dives straight back into Reginald Hargreeves’s chest.

On the stretcher Luther jolts, electrified-like. So does the heart monitor, every beat crisp and loud. The black web writhes on Luther’s chest, darkly unquiet; but then it scuttles away from Luther’s arm, up Luther’s chest again, as if drawn to the new puncture. Only Pogo stays transfixed, a look of horror on his face.

“Move,” Diego tells him, and crosses over to help Mom.

* * *

Sir Reginald, typically, doesn’t die.

He does however flee the scene - if so undignified a verb can befit Sir. So does Pogo. By the time Luther opens his eyes, the two of them have vamoosed. Taking most of the papers in Sir’s study, as Mom marvels aloud when she goes to clean it. 

Only a letter left, that starts with “Your father will live, but not let any of you see him again”. On and on it goes, three pages of Pogo's stern-but-kind pontificating. Diego reads the first lines and tosses it away. Anything Sir-related can wait, but Luther waking up, not alone, cannot and will not wait.

Luther wakes up on the third day. The first thing he does is look down at his naked arms and chest.

“Still the prettiest,” Diego says, seated at his bedside. He waits to see if Luther will ask for Sir, but Luther only keeps looking.

“... it’s gone,” he says at least. “My tattoo.”

“Yeah,” Diego says. He tries to gentle his voice - he’s had a few days’ practice, when Luther was too out of it to critique his moves. “I’m sorry, man. But… I don’t think it got to the core.”

Luther follows his gaze down the strong line of his arm, down to his left wrist. There lies his mark, space-blue and ocean-green, its semi-circle both prolonged and bisected by a vertical line. Circle and line seam into each other, making the mark a beautiful, entirely readable whole.

[ ](https://imgur.com/992PFLy)

“O,” says Luther, the word a ring of wonder.

“Yup,” Diego says, never the family poet. 

He sort of bends sideways, and Luther leans back, until Diego's head is hogging half the pillow and the left side of Luther’s neck.

“You?” Luther murmurs.

“Got my eye on a tattoo parlor,” Diego says hoarsely. When Luther stares, he shrugs. “What, you think you have a monopoly on letters? Just for that, I’m getting a C.” _ For Captain my Captain _goes unsaid. 

Luther chuckles, a prodigious sound. It eddies down Diego’s chest like a deep-dive caress, making him glad. 

“Waning moon. They used to say... it marked the start of... growth. What had been cut down would grow again. Trees. Hair. Relationships.”

“Pretty big difference there, Nostradamus.”

“Still,” Luther says. “Don’t leave. Or if you do, then don’t let me let you go. Just… I don’t want to find this place empty, next time I wake.”

Diego kisses the side of his neck, firm and long. Unhurried, until Luther’s throat relaxes in pleasure. 

“But what if there’s a… say, a _ Dave _ around, all buffed and blond, looking for his soulmate?”

“Klaus can have him,” Luther mumbles, and Diego thinks, yeah, he should go look for Klaus. Tell him Ms. Cartano is well and truly avenged, and their childhood home is clean, the bogeyman gone. He strokes a hand across Luther’s clavicle, his thoughts musing off to Ben, and Klaus’s dogged assertion that Ben never went away. Perhaps... And then, there’s Vanya and her treble clef - Diego did spot her name in Pogo’s writings. Vanya herself sucked as a writer, but if she hadn’t, would Luther have spoken from the soul? Would Diego have heard him from across their common wasted land? 

Perhaps it’s time to regrow the family tree, after all. 

“We’re calling them tomorrow,” he says, and Luther’s breath answers him, a light hum of gratitude. Further along the house, Mom is singing. Birds call from the yard garden. The house is reaching out to these sounds, letting them roost where there's been only space, stone and an old man’s craze for too long.

“Sleep,” he whispers to Luther, plaiting their hands together, a work of progress. "Sleep and get strong for me."

And then...


End file.
